Meeting Notes 2015-12-30

Sudoroom meeting Wednesday December 30

intros

Ice-breaker question(s):

• Any new year's resolutions?
  • I.e. do you have any things you know you won't do but you might tell people you're going to do on or around January 1st over 2016?

Attendees

• remote-yar - no.
• Matt - Never going to ask this question again. Clean up my own messes.
• daniel = funny question. maybe get a job.
• Robb - No solidified resolutions yet. I am planning on it though, but I never actually do it, but it gives me direction. Maybe I'll change that this year.
• Charley - I'm gonna try to go to sudo room MORE!
• Sigma - Stop organizing my life-goals around yearly delimiters.
• Joel - go on more dates
• Lef - No more side-projects! I would like to do more on radio archiving and I want to investigate some data-mining for grabbing multilingual text from the internet.
• Flannery - no social fear

Ian Murdock

Died, and apparently public records show he had been arrested. Twitter account had erradic messages. Very unclear what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock

• Should we put a little note of condolences at sudoroom.org?
• yar: I don't see how he's different from all the other people who've died lately.
  • It was just something brought up and talked about during the meeting.
  • yar: obviously

new members

• Charley Sheets
  • (Pseudo)nym or Name: Charley
  • Email: rcsheets@acm.org
  • Why do you want to be a member of sudo room?: Hackerspaces are important to me, and something that's been largely missing from my life since I left Hacker Dojo over a year ago. I've been loosely involved with Sudo Room for a while now, but I'd like to finally become an official member. I desire a sense of community with fellow hackers, and though I've been slow to become involved due to time constraints, I hope to become more involved and spend more time in the space in the coming months.
  • If you know already, what are you excited to do at sudo room?: Hang out, feel a sense of community, and spend some time working on sudo-humans and other projects that benefit Sudo Room. Other than that, who knows? I'm sure more exciting things will come up on their own.
  • If you know already, what are you excited to share with the sudo room community?: not sure yet
  • Have you ever been banned from another hackerspace? If so, when and why?: no

Also following the New Member Script: https://sudoroom.org/wiki/New_Member_Script Sudo Room's new years resolution is to have each member at the meeting read the questions in circle, instead of one member reading them all! (a non-consensus of 1+1)

• Would you like to very briefly introduce yourself? - am charley sheets, moved to the bay area nearly 4 years ago, I am a professional geek.
• What brings you to sudo room? - I didn't come here to be warm. I came here to join the sudo room. I want to be part of a community of hackers, tinkerers, and geeks. I think I found one
• What to hack on or learn? - Definitely some of the homegrown stuff, sudo-humans, door system, and I'm not sure what else yet.
• Share or teach? - Linux-type knowledge, I have some of that to shrae. I can do some programming and I'd be happy to share that.
• What's your plan to abolish sexual violence, police brutality and white supremacy? in 10 words or less - Acknowledge the problem and don't be part of it.
• What's your plan to end the anthropocene extinction, world hunger, global warming and global inequality? in 10 words or less - Don't have many kids (that's just me, not other people).

  Someone said "true fact"

  yar: even the qualifier fits under 10 words. well done.

• What's your plan to ensure freedom and privacy of communication for all? in 10 words or less - Spread more privacy-enabling tools.

Lef read the expectations, including the "Is this going to be a problem for you?". Charley answered "no".

The statement of solidarity was reviewed

The safer space policy was longer, and people said they would read it in more detail later

• Have you ever been banned, asked to take a break, or similar, from a hackerspace or any other collective? - No
• What are the best ways to contact you?

  Text if you have my number, IRC (rcsheets), email (rcsheets@acm.org)

• What is your schedule like? Do you have particular times that you think you'll be around? You should check out our regular events! - Schedule variates a lot. Not sure when I will be here. Fairly sporadical.

homes not jails

We have 5 members present in-person, 1 online.

Questions for them (non-blocking concerns):

• What specific skills does your collective have to offer?
• How would you be able to contribute to the building, be specific?
• Can we agree on an equivalent amount that the closet would normally cost, which would be entirely waived for your collective because of your work?
• Can your collective commit to hosting at least one fundraiser for Omni Commons annually?
• Can you agree that if sudo room changes its name to "room not rent" that maybe we too should not pay rent? j/k, but srsly ;)
  • i don't care if you're joking, we should really unpack everything that is problematic with this kind of attitude. you're treating Omni as a site of competition rather than cooperation. start from the premise that we're all building a commons, and the commons should include both a space for hacking technology and a space for housing activism. the same people can participate in either of these things, and people in either group with the privilege of having enough money, should give what they can to support the ENTIRE community. it's also a lot more likely that a hackerspace will have members able to pay, since new members show up all the time who basically got a tech job, moved here, googled "hackerspace", showed up and became sudoroom members. meanwhile people who already live here and don't have tech jobs are struggling because newcomers are driving up their rents, and have to resort to things like squatting. then they come and ask for some space, and people with nice tech jobs reply with "what if i don't want to pay either?" seriously?
• yar thinks this is a lot of bullshit when all that should really be asked is "what are you able to pay" and when the answer is "nothing" then the conversation should be about how their work fits with omni's mission. period. These conversations about money have been so distressing and disappointing that I'm considering proposing that Omni have totally "need-blind admission", that new member collective proposals don't even consider money, and that happen in private conversation with the finance working group. Because the way we're doing things is just poisonous.